


i love you, don't you know

by ruffboi



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Angst with no happy ending, Background Lorna Crowley/Tess Greymane - Freeform, Gen, Genn Greymane is an abusive bastard, Lorna and Liam are essentially twins, Lorna hates Genn, Lorna loves her father, So take that as you will, Tess is only mentioned like twice so she doesn't get tagged as a character, but only just a bit, if you ignore the official timeline, it's just such a mess, lorna and liam are essentially platonic soulmates, sorry canon is a bitch y'all, there is no incest but there's talk of lorna and liam getting married when they feel like siblings, this is loosely canon compliant, vague references to alcoholism, you can't see the genn/darius but it's there under everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:41:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23474119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruffboi/pseuds/ruffboi
Summary: When they’re little, Lorna and Liam’s parents always joke that they’re twins. Mia rocks Lorna to sleep and Darius changes Liam’s diapers and Genn walks the halls with one of them in each arm making faces at them while they scream with laughter.Or, Lorna and Liam are two halves of a whole. Until they aren't (but they are all the same).
Relationships: Lorna Crowley & Liam Greymane
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	i love you, don't you know

**Author's Note:**

> Official Timeline? _What_ official timeline? I certainly don't know.
> 
> There are no explicit ages given, but Lorna and Liam are young teens when the wall goes up and in their late 20s/early 30s when it comes down.
> 
> (Genn/Darius was happening in the background but really it doesn't matter for this.)
> 
> Written for Birdie and Jack
> 
> Title from "Welly Boots" by The Amazing Devil.

When they’re little, Lorna and Liam’s parents always joke that they’re twins. Mia rocks Lorna to sleep and Darius changes Liam’s diapers and Genn walks the halls with one of them in each arm making faces at them while they scream with laughter.

As they get older, they’re no less inseparable, spending long stretches of time moving between the manor and the orchards together, being watched over by all three parents (and Liam’s nanny) in turn, sharing tutors as they get old enough, playing and learning and whispering in words they created themselves (to their tutors’ eternal frustration). Summers and autumns are often spent running through the Crowley orchards, eating sun-warmed apples, and the springs find them weaving flower crowns and abandoning their clothes to swim naked (and shrieking from the cold) in snowmelt-flooded streams and ponds.

Tess is born to a life of two heads bent over her cradle, awe and adoration in two pairs of wide brown eyes, and shared whispered promises to always take care of her, because she’s their little sister, and that’s what big brothers and big sisters do. She can’t follow them on their adventures, but they allow her presence more than some children their age would bother, and they love her dearly.

As they get older, of course, things change. The gleeful naked swimming in the creek stops, more because naked swimming is frowned on and they’d get in trouble if caught than because they care about seeing each other naked. Liam has more tutors and Lorna grumbles through Mia’s sewing lessons, missing him. Talk starts of “uniting the Greymane and Crowley families”, and of betrothing them, and they are quietly grateful to Darius and his desire to not make that decision _for_ his daughter, especially when she was so young. Being married and expected to have children to carry on the family line would be the worst thing in the world. They’re _twins_ , it’s horrifying to think about doing that with each other.

Then the wall goes up.

Liam was with his father, visiting the forces at the wall after its completion, when the Worgen came. He’s solemn when he comes back, and Lorna sneaks into his room that night and they whisper under the covers like they had when they were kids, and he tells her things he knows he shouldn’t and swears her to secrecy and cries, and for once Lorna hates Uncle Genn, just a little bit, for not listening to Liam’s appeal to reason, and for making her twin cry.

It’s not long after that Lorna’s father says they’re going to spend a season at some old family lands in the Northern Headlands, and Lorna begs and pleads to be allowed to stay at the Manor, to not leave Liam, not for that long, but Darius is determined. “It’s been hard on our people to be split away from Silverpine,” he says gently, so many times, in front of Genn and Liam and Mia, and in the privacy of their home in the orchards. “We need to go make sure peace is kept.” Uncle Genn agrees, when he hears, though he seems oddly reluctant, and Aunt Mia reassures them the trip will be over before they know it, and Lorna grasps Liam’s hands the morning they leave and solemnly promises she’ll come back as soon as her father will let her.

“What if you like it better up north and decide to stay forever?” he asks, mostly joking. They’re too old for tears, they think ( _they’re so painfully young to live through this_ , Darius thinks), but Liam’s eyes are shining.

“I will _always_ come back for you,” Lorna tells him fiercely, squeezing his hands, nothing but determination flashing in her eyes. (She doesn’t see the way her father turns away to hide a grimace that flickers across his face.) " _Always_."

“You don’t have to be _that_ dramatic about it,” Liam says, but wraps her in a tight hug and kisses her cheek. “I’ll see you soon.”

Her father tells her, once they’re far out of town, about what he has planned. About the rebellion.

She doesn’t get back to Liam for too long.

When she does, it’s on the heels of her father’s arrest for treason.

“Of course we don’t blame you for his actions,” Genn (not Uncle Genn, not anymore and never again) soothes when she’s brought to the manor. She sees the shape of him now, the insincerity, the manipulation, the coldness behind his eyes. She doesn’t trust him for a moment.

She lets herself be soft, though, just enough, just for a while. She permits him to comfort her along with Mia and Liam and Tess. She speaks softly and smiles sadly and turns down his “And of course we’ll foster you, you’re practically our own daughter!” with an insincere concern that it might incite further rebellion, that what people she (not her father anymore, traitor to the crown that he is) still has may still sympathize more with her father’s rebellion, that they will see it as the king trying to control them through her.

He can’t argue with it. He doesn’t see the way her eyes flash hatred when his back turns.

Her father had not forced her to help the rebellion as much as a teenage girl being kept safe in a secret place could. That, she’d done all on her own, for the love of her people. For the love of her father.

She spends little time in the Manor, after that week, only coming to see Liam when he’s unable to come to the orchards for too long. Whatever hatred she holds for Genn, Liam is still her twin, and he is sympathetic to the rebellion even in its failure; and she clings to the comfort of knowing that while she no longer knows the man she once thought of as a second father, she still knows Liam. She will always know Liam, and he will always know her. She rants about Genn and his betrayal of their people and of her father quietly (in the Manor) and loudly (in the orchards) to him, and in time to Tess. (Tess who was her baby sister but Tess who had gone to a lady’s school and comes back not her sister, not anymore, not quite, and Lorna can’t stop staring until Tess finally kisses her and then she still can’t stop staring and maybe never will.)

She holds on and holds on and thinks and says dangerous things that Liam calms her from acting on, and she says nothing about how she suffers the suspicion of the Gilneans who distrust her for being her father’s daughter, and she tries so many times to see her father and she is always turned away, even when Genn swears he’ll make sure they allow it.

(“It’s such a shame he was quarantined for fever, what awful timing, I’m so sorry my dear.” “Alas that one can’t predict a prison riot, you can try again next month perhaps.” “A prison _must_ have rules, it’s disappointing that he broke them and is being punished.”

She hates Genn so much she feels like the very thought of him could make her sick, if she let it.)

They survive. Talk of her marrying Liam never really stops, and picks up again as they age. Genn suggests it at least once a year. They’re so close, after all, and perhaps it would help heal the wound of the Northgate Rebellion. She turns to the other half of her heart, every time, to share a pained look. She always says no.

They are twins. They are two halves of a whole, two pieces of a soul placed in two different bodies, and they could never, ever, not in a million years bring themselves to love each other _like that_.

When the worgen come, Genn orders her father and his men freed, and Lorna thinks her heart will burst from joy, and meeting Liam’s eyes behind the king’s back she knows he’s feeling it too, for her. She’s a grown woman but the thought of getting her Papa back is the biggest most wonderfully childish feeling, and she can’t stop smiling even through the horrible things that are happening. She can’t make her way to him yet, but when they’ve escaped the city, they’ll have time, and she’ll be able to find him again.

And then Liam comes back from the cathedral.

Darius doesn’t.

Her anger comes into sharp focus, not at the worgen, certainly not at Liam who she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt would not have left if her father hadn’t insisted (and even so many years later, he’s still Liam’s second father too, and Liam was always more obedient than she was).

She lifts her shotgun and points it at Genn, the muzzle bare inches from his chest.

“You _bastard_ ,” she hisses, as the last of her care to keep him from seeing her hatred goes up in brilliant flames with the city behind them. " _I know what you did_ ," she says, too soft for anyone but them to hear, a secret from so many years ago heavy on her tongue. “I know who the real traitor is.”

Genn doesn’t look frightened when she first points the gun at him. He thinks this is grief for her father alone, probably, thinks she won’t follow through. He knows she doesn’t love him as she once did, but he has assumed it was only for taking her father away, and until now she has been willing to let him think so. His eyes darken at her words, her finger tightens on the trigger, not enough yet, not enough yet, she’ll be taken away from the new king (Liam Liam Liam) if she does this, she’ll be imprisoned or executed but it doesn’t matter. She can end this now, remove this threat to the safety of her people - _all_ her people, all of Gilneas - right now.

“Lorna,” comes Liam’s voice at her side, and she doesn’t look away from Genn but she can feel the other half of her heart standing next to her, more real than the shape of him in the corner of her vision, and she knows before he asks that she won’t shoot.

Only for him. Only ever for him would she not shoot, and she doesn’t, she listens to his words and lowers her gun and stalks away.

The rumors say she was grief-stricken, that Prince Liam talked her down and led her away crying, mourning the loss of her father who she never got to reunite with.

(Lorna strode away from Genn with her head high and her eyes dry, nothing but determination flashing in them.)

She hates Liam for it. For being the only one she would give up everything for and using it to save _that man_ , who didn’t deserve a butterfly’s fart worth of care and love and protection, certainly not from his “disappointing” son full of grace and kindness and honor, who he dismissed and failed to appreciate every fucking day. She hates Liam, but she doesn’t really, because they’re two halves of a whole, but when she tries to find comfort in him, for everything that happened, for the loss of her father and the devastation of their people, she finds him at the bottom of a bottle, and no matter how much she begs and yells and rails, he won’t come out of it, and after weeks of trying she loses her temper and they scream, they scream like banshees and sirens and wailing gulls and the creak of a ship’s mast before it snaps in a storm, and she still hates him for stopping her shooting and she hates herself for not shooting a long long time ago, and she goes back to her orchard and leaves him to drown.

(If he won’t take her hand desperately reaching out to him, she can’t lean over so far that she falls in too. She would do anything for him, but if she’s going to drown she has to make sure first that he _won’t_ , and if she keeps reaching like this they’ll both go under.)

They mend, eventually. They are a soul in two people, they can’t be split forever, and they stitch up like a deep wound being mended, and the needle hurts, and the raw edges are tender as the stitches are put in, but they’re mended and healing and that’s what matters in the end.

They haven’t fully healed yet when the earthquakes start.

When the wall is breached and the Forsaken attack, when they have to flee for higher ground. When her father is alive alive alive, and Genn’s secret (one of his secrets, not enough of his secrets) is revealed.

When they try to retake the city.

When Sylvanas tries to

When Liam

When

…

Liam Greymane and Lorna Crowley are twins. They are two halves of a whole. They are one soul placed in two bodies. They are the other half of each other’s hearts.

The other half of her heart puts himself in front of the man she hates more than anything else in the world, and time seems to freeze. An arrow mid-flight, Liam diving towards his father (traitor traitor TRAITOR!) and for a split second she hates Liam again for what he asked her to do. For a lifetime she’ll hate herself for listening.

Time unfreezes.

The arrow flies.

Genn’s bellow of rage (not at the loss of his son, no, but at the loss of a _possession_ ) is dwarfed by the scream ripped from her as the arrow buries itself in half of her heart and it falls to the ground in the courtyard in front of a man who will never appreciate what was lost so he could live. The Banshee Queen herself could not hope to match her in grief and fear and pain pain pain, because Sylvanas may have lost much and seen such grief and been brought back a monster, but _Lorna’s soul is rent in twain_ and she still lives lives lives, somehow despite it all she _lives_.

They were two halves of a whole, half of each others’ hearts, they two, from the day Lorna was born.

They were two halves of a whole.

Lorna will never be whole again.

**Author's Note:**

> I can be found at [@ruffboijuliaburnsides](http://ruffboijuliaburnsides.tumblr.com) if you wanna do a yell.


End file.
